Non-ASCII characters in a display name of a forwarded message are displayed as (?) characters in an Exchange Server 2007 environment

Consider the following scenario:

• You have a computer that is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
• A user creates a contact, and the display name of the contact is in East Asian characters, such as Chinese and Japanese characters.
• An auto-forward rule is created to forward a message to the contact.
• An incoming message contains only ASCII characters.

When the incoming message is auto-forwarded to the contact in this scenario, the non-ASCII characters in a display name are displayed as question mark (?) characters.

This problem occurs because Transport Service handles the server-side rules in Exchange Server 2007. Transport Service resolves a contact's address and then encodes the display name of the contact. If there is a charset in the MIME message, the character set is used for encoding the display name. In this scenario, Exchange Server 2007 does not recognize that there are non-ASCII characters involved. Therefore, US-ASCII characters are used for encoding, and the non-ASCII characters in the display name are displayed as "?" characters.

To resolve this problem, install the following update rollup:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.